American Porn by Heathcote Williams

By Heathcote Williams

Legendary British writer and ‘scourge of the establishment’, Heathcote Williams turn his acerbic pen to American politics, showing how President Trump is the progeny of a political establishment which has been steeped for centuries in violence, artifice and greed.

'American Porn' is a continuation of new, 'investigative poetry' works addressing major political events. Williams has also published 'Badshah Khan: Islamic Peace Warrior' and 'Brexit Boris: From Mayor to Nightmare'.

Williams's literary activism began with the best-selling books 'Whale Nation', 'Autogeddon', 'Falling for a Dolphin' and 'Sacred Elephant'.

Fact File: Williams’s greatest fans include Jeremy Hardy and Al Pacino; he was a celebrity guest in the last episode of Friends; he writes songs with Marianne Faithful; Bob Hoskins taught him fire-eating and he is a fully paid up member of the magic circle.

Biographical details:
Eton and Oxford educated, few would have anticipated his life-long devotion to anti-establishment causes, including running the infamous Rough Tough Cream Puff squatting ‘estate agency’ in the 1970s.

Contents include: The United States of Porn; President Donald J.Trump, World Emperor; Snuff Films at The White House; The White House Fly and Hollywoodland

• Language: English
• Publisher: Thin Man Press
• Release date: Jun 15, 2017
• ISBN: 9781999794002

Book preview

AMERICAN PORN

Heathcote Williams

Image © Gee Vaucher

‘The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters.’

— Antonio Gramsci

Smashwords edition

Thin Man Press 2017

Copyright © Heathcote Williams

The right of Heathcote Williams to be identified as the Author of the Work

has been asserted by him in accordance with the

Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means

without the prior written permission of the publisher.

Contents

The United States of Porn

Health Warning

Trump versus Clinton

President Donald J. Trump

The White House Fly

Hollywoodland

Snuff Films at the White House

Mr President

The President of the United States Is Really a Tree

Happy Thanksgiving!

America: How it Works

The Atomic Museum

Septimus Severus

The Dying Bee

Name a Radical Film

The Lion and the Lamb

The President of the United States is Weeping

The Dalai Lama, ISIS and America

Acknowledgments

Grateful acknowledgments to Susan de Muth, John Lahr, Elena Caldera, Colin Gibson, Eddie Mizzi, Rex Pyke, Dave Motion, Lily Williams, Nigel Allen, Graham Yates, Jon Kunac-Tabinor, Carrie Giunta, Paula Finch, Robin Beste, Martin Wilkinson, Simon Drake and Mike Figgis.

Three of these poems were first published in a limited edition of 36 copies by Gerard Bellaart of Cold Turkey Press. A reading by the author of The United States of Porn, recorded by Jan Herman, was released by Sea Urchin Editions in 2013.

©Elena Caldera

The United States of Porn

Amerigo Vespucci, of Florence,

A peddler of pornography,

Gave his name to America.

When Martin Waldseemuller,

A sixteenth-century map-maker,

Was looking for a suitable name

For a particular land mass to the West,

Thought to hold a shortcut —

The fabled North West Passage to India —

Long sought after by navigators who hoped

That it might spare them circumventing the Cape

On that continent’s treacherous, southernmost tip.

Waldseemuller thought at first of calling it the North Indies

(In line with the West Indies and the East Indies),

Until the name of Amerigo Vespucci entered his mind.

Amerigo, a senior steward of Lorenzo de Medici,

Had travelled both to Guinea and to Brazil

And written accounts of his adventures

In which he revealed that, after living with Amazon Indians

For all of two weeks, he had discovered

That his hosts in the rain forest were naked.

This of course was appropriate on their part —

Their being nearer the equator than Florence —

However, Amerigo, their beady-eyed guest, foresaw a market

In the drawing-rooms of Italy for some prurient tales

In which he'd detail their customs and invent some more.

With a tabloid glee he’d make out the Indians to be outlandish —

They frolicked in the sun, had carefree orgies; and fecklessly killed

Unwanted children, on whom, Amerigo would insist, they snacked.

In these fables, the indigenous people were erotomaniac cannibals.

His readers lapped up his exploitational gallimaufry

Set in a paradise untrammelled by Church or State

And his salacious tales became an Italian bestseller.

Even though Amerigo was never in fact to set foot upon it,

Waldseemuller gave what would become ‘America’ his name.

It was just business: Waldseemuller was spicing up his maps

By capitalizing on the notoriety of Amerigo’s accounts.

Thus America, along with its dream, was named after a porn writer

Who worked for the Medici, the mafia of the Middle Ages.

‘In my beginning is my end,’ wrote Eliot in The Four Quartets

And now Amerigo’s bankrupt landmass survives on pornography

And on the profits from the sale of its instruments of killing.

Chatsworth, California, is the HQ of America’s Pornocracy

Where the vulnerable are herded by the voracious

Into the maws of a multi-trillion-dollar industry.

An industry strewn with suicides who’ve lost their identity

To repetitive humping in exchange for money and for drugs

In a forlornly unfulfilled wasteland frantic for a hole to fill.

A new porn video is produced every thirty minutes in the USA

Where ninety-seven percent of all pornographic web pages

Are generated for a global food chain of interlinked Personal Computers.

Phillip Toledano, Photographs of men watching online pornography, taken on January 25, 2011, New York: New York Review 

When Adolf Hitler was preparing to invade Poland,

The sinister, lip-smacking troll, Doctor Goebbels,

Hobbled beside him, straight out of a Wagner opera.

Goebbels was an expert on how to debilitate opponents

And,